London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

Tens of thousands of people have died from starvation in Somalia as a devastating drought takes its toll on the region and the United Nations has announced that the situation is serious enough to be described as a famine. But the emergency response has been inadequate so far and must now be stepped up, according to London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine experts who have worked in crisis situations around the world.

Dr Francesco Checchi, a lecturer in the Department of Disease Control and an expert in infectious disease surveillance and control in crisis-affected populations, said: "Data on malnutrition and death rates emerging from Somalia are consistent with a situation of famine - the ultimate and rarely seen benchmark in the scale of severity of a food crisis. By any calculation, these data suggest tens of thousands, mainly children, have died as a result of this emergency, and that the extent of the humanitarian response has been insufficient thus far."

Dame Claire Bertschinger, Director of Tropical Nursing Studies and inspiration for Bob Geldof to organise the Band Aid charity and Live Aid, said: “It is vital to provide food now to avoid the long term effects of malnutrition. These people need basic food to stay alive: for the price of a bag of crisps you can save a child’s life. They are not asking for the luxury of a football or new trainers - what is needed now is basic food such as beans, oil and flour.”

Karl Blanchet, lecturer in health systems research at the International Centre for Eye and author of a recently-published book, Many Reasons To Intervene: French and British Approaches to Humanitarian Action, said: “The health situation in the southern regions of Somalia is catastrophic. Today, more than 300,000 people suffer from acute malnutrition in a region where international aid agencies do not have access to people. The international emergency response is currently inadequate to the scale of the situation. If appropriate assistance is not urgently provided, the famine will spread to the rest of the country and people will continue to submerge the refugee camps of Kenya, already overloaded by the recent wave of new arrivals.”

Claire Schofield, a lecturer and expert in public health nutrition, said: "Once people make the decision to leave their homes and go looking for help, we know that their lives as they knew them will be changed forever and it has now become a simple matter of life or death. Many will die, but for those that make it to the refugee camps and treatment centres where help is available, we have the technical expertise and specialist foods for treating severely malnourished children and adults. The malnutrition rate in this famine in children under 5 years is currently above 30%. Past experience has shown that with the correct treatment, we can bring this down to below 5% and so, most severely malnourished children can potentially survive.”